Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Dave was totally right in his VC Monday Madness video: I enjoy Double Dragon glitches. The best-known glitch -- and the most useful -- is the experience factory found in the second level. It's easy to completely fill up your heart gauge and unlock every move simply by walking over to the pile of girders after the climbing fence, then going back across the fence, and back again. This will cause the Williams enemy who was standing in front of the girders to disappear, and you can punch the crap out of his ghost for as long as your timer allows. Later in the same level you can defeat the boss by running away from him. He disappears and the game counts it as victory. I'm also a fan of the glitch-bat, which occurs when you swing a weapon just as it's supposed to disappear, leaving a weird bar made up of other graphical elements from the game.

But my favorite glitch in Double Dragon on the NES is at best useless and actually pretty likely to hurt you. At the end of the first area, you can climb up these -- gutters? Pipes? I don't know what they are. Really, they're just wall decoration. But you can walk straight up that wall. Walk up high enough and you'll come back up to the bottom of the screen. Walk downward and you'll die. Move left and you'll warp back to the ground. Try to jump or attack and you'll fall over. Sometimes one of the Linda enemies will try to follow you up the wall and will just end up in some flickery jiggle maneuver just off the ground.

I pretty much can't get to this part of the game without messing with the wall for a while. I can't even explain why it's so amusing. I could only find one video of this glitch in action (at around 2:50), but be warned -- it's one of those YouTube videos with audio of some guy mocking the game as he plays -- the scourge of the retrogaming blogger.

Now that we've finally gotten River City Ransom, Nintendo has saw fit to take a lazy week and only provide us with one new Virtual Console game to download. At least it's a good one though, as Double Dragon on the NES owns. Likely, many of you recall it doing just that as a child.

So hit up the video above, then head past the break for more.

This week sees a lone wolf of a release on the Virtual Console. And, to kill the sense of suspense as to what the game is (unless you like to, uh, read the title of posts), we already knew it was hitting today. That's not to say the game isn't good, though!

This week's Virtual Console release is:

• Double Dragon (NES, 1 - 2 players, 500 Wii Points)

As usual, be sure to stop by later for our video wrap-up of this week's releases, complete with commentary and direct-feed game footage. We hope to see you there!

A trio of games this week on the PAL Virtual Console (all of which would be dead to us if "Ninja Dragon Games" actually existed), including one we totally want, one that will probably be undeservedly overlooked in favor of the one we totally want and, um, World Games (Commodore 64), which we're entirely unfamiliar with.

The former, obviously, is Double Dragon (NES), and although we plan to download Technos' landmark game with a quickness, we feel a bit bad for The Last Ninja (Commodore 64), which deserves some attention, if only for its amazing soundtrack. Check videos of all three out after the blue words, and marvel at how barrel jumping looks ... oddly compelling.

• Double Dragon -- NES -- 500 Wii Points
• World Games -- Commodore 64 -- 500 Wii Points*
• The Last Ninja -- Commodore 64 -- 500 Wii Points*
  

* Only in Europe.

Hey, Generic Dudes, guess what? Aksys Games has announced that they are, in fact, bringing the two Technos games found in the ESRB database to the Virtual Console -- along with another one that just happens to be the best game on the Nintendo Entertainment System!

River City Ransom. Next week. Five dollars.

The week after that, Double Dragon will become available (which would be awesome news if not for OMG RIVER CITY RANSOM SERIOUSLY), and the week after that, Renegade. If you don't have a Wii, you should probably go ahead and buy one now, because it just got its killer app.

When they made the deal for Super Dodgeball Brawlers, Arc System Works apparently got the rights to Technos Japan's back catalog. Their name shows up as the publisher of all the Technos games available in Japan on the Virtual Console, including Nekketsu Kouha Kunio. Aksys Games has been the American publisher for every recent Arc game. That would seem to imply that Aksys could publish Technos's games on the American Virtual Console. The fact that it is actually happening strengthens our theory.

The aforementioned Nekketsu Kouha Kunio, known over here as Renegade, has now been rated by the ESRB for U.S. release, published by Aksys, along with a Technos game that is more relevant to people who like good games: Double Dragon. Even more relevant: this opens the door for an American release of River City Ransom!